Guillotine’s Adventures in the Age of Piracy

Stuck in isolation, I’m catching up on all my half-finished projects.

For Blood & Plunder my backlog is:

• Bunch of characters and legendary commanders
• European Cavalry
• Unaligned faction box
• Half-done ships. Sails etc.

Continuing with my Spanish force, here’s a unit of Soldados. The models are ”European Soldiers” from Firelock.

Characterful models, these were very fun to paint ?

Adding into my Spanish force, here’s Milicianos Artilleros. The dude with the cannon balls must be one of my favourites from the range.

Continuing with my Spanish, I painted the commander and some more sailors.

More work on the brigantine. I painted the cannons and the swivel guns added in the basic rigging. It starts to look like a ship now!

Continuing painting the brigantine, I moved on to the detail bits.

I painted the gold details using the Army Painter gold metallics and washed them with Agrax earthshade.

The windows were first painted white, then added yellow and orange washes and after dry some additional highlighting in the middle with light yellow.

Taking a break from the ships business, I painted a group of Marineros.

It wouldn’t be a Blood & Plunder project without ships, right? I’ve got two to work on: a brigantine and the mighty galleon. As the first steps would be more or less the same for both ships, I decided to work on them at the same time.

The clean-up and building was surprisingly little effort. The Firelock Games resin ships come as big hunks of resin, with very little flash and bold lines to tidy up. The most time consuming, and the fiddliest, part is gluing on the metal guns and the gun ports.

I primed the ships with Mig One Shot grey primer, using an airbrush.

After the initial primer, I went in with black and airbrushed shading on all the inside corners, around doors, windows and the gun ports.

To finalise the pre-shading stage I added some highlights with lighter grey airbrushed from roughly 45 degrees angle, catching all raised areas and especially the decks.

As all the pre-shading was done with primer paints, I left the ships to dry overnight, to ensure that the primer doesn’t “bleed in” to the main colours by darkening or dulling it down as it dries.

I wanted to go different colours for the ship hulls. For the brigantine, I chose a darker, more red brown, while the galleon would be a medium brown.

The colours used:
Galleon: AP Monster Brown
Brigantine: AP Oak Brown
Deck: VMA Light Brown

To avoid covering the earlier pre-shading work, I thinned down the paint heavily. With some trial and error, I ended up using Airbrush thinner, flow improver and Mig transparator.

Continuing with the Spanish, here’s a unit of Lanceros. I followed the same pattern of painting the repeat sculpts in different schemes.

Kicking off the painting from the Spanish, and the Milicianos in particular. I thoroughly enjoyed working on these, the sculpts are very painter friendly with clear and bold details. And as always when you get to use a bit broader pallette than uniforms, the brushwork becomes less of a chore. In the set there are duplicates of each sculpt. I simply separeted these into two groups and used different colour schemes for the repeats.